Welcome to what is the start of many community focused updates to come. Today I want to start going into detail about just what is Rising Storm 2: Vietnam. Vietnam will be a standalone game in the Red Orchestra/Rising Storm franchise. We are bringing the series forward into a new era of warfare as well as emphasising the core elements and experiences of the franchise that our fans love and have come to expect.

Building off our experience with the first Rising Storm (winner of PC Gamer’s “Game of the Year” award in 2013), Vietnam will feature the asymmetrical combat between the United States Army and Marine Corps, fighting the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong irregulars. This will be the franchise's first step into the modern era, where the competing forces are (mostly) armed with automatic weaponry, as well as having even more supporting firepower available, in terms of artillery and air support.

Due to this step forward in time, as well as player feedback and lessons learned from Red Orchestra 2 & Rising Storm, much of our time since the announcement of the game has been on designing and prototyping refinements to core elements of the game, as well as new features.

The first two of the central pillars of gameplay to look at are Squads and Firefights. There have been many discussions on the forums on these two topics, but here are some thoughts from us:

The new squad system is currently being built with an emphasis toward playing with your friends, ease of cooperation/working with the rest of the squad and squad communications. This squad system should provide more “friend” functionality, while removing some of the complexity of the old system.
In general, we are aiming to promote more defined firefights between players, enhancing and updating some of the core shooting mechanics. Not going to help if you let someone sneak up behind you, or ambush you from 10 feet away - or you let Mr Snipey take a carefully worked shot at your head. But for face-to-face engagements at normal combat ranges, a little more thought, practice and skill may be needed. Easy to use and understand, a need for calm under fire, but still deadly.

We will be sharing more information about both of these systems, other changes and new features as we move forward.

Rising Storm 2: Vietnam is being built on top of an enhanced version of the RO2/RS (UE3) platform with some new graphical features. As part of this we are also working to enhance our community SDK by looking to clear modding roadblocks that were encountered on our previous titles.

The lead developer for Rising Storm 2: Vietnam is the team that brought you Rising Storm, some of whom came from the Red Orchestra modding community (such as the Darkest Hour team) - Antimatter Games ( www.antimattergames.com ). Antimatter Games will be bringing the game to you some time this year!